Black History at FSU: Reverend Dr. William R. Jones
This Black History Month we are spotlighting Reverend Dr. William R. Jones. In 1977, Jones helped found and became the director of Florida State University’s African American Studies program. He retired from FSU in 1999 as Professor Emeritus. Dr. William R. Jones was born July 17, 1933 in Louisville, Kentucky. He attended Howard University, where…
A Book Lover Lost Through Time: Women’s Names In Archival Description
It is no secret that the voices, experiences, and identities of women in history have been considerably obscured through time. Coverture, a legal concept, was likely introduced into Europe around the 11th Century and persisted well into the 19th century. It stipulated that upon marriage a woman’s legal identity was to be absorbed by her…
Under Lock and Key: The Chained Book
One of our most interesting books from the late medieval/early modern period is our copy of Sermones discipuli. The materiality of this book is impressive, with it’s heavy covers, brass cornerpieces and brass bosses. However, one of the more interesting elements lies at the top of the book, where a heavy metal ring is attached…
Digitizing the Leon County School Board Minutes
Through a community partnership with the Leon County School District office, Florida State University is digitizing and providing public access to the district’s collection of School Board Minutes which record the history of the school board from 1877 to present. The FSU Digital Library Center has been hard at work digitizing these minutes, which come…
New Digital Collection: 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents
A series of over 600 documents have now been digitized by the Digital Library Center into DigiNole, FSU’s digital library! The 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents collection features manuscripts from 1618-1981 relating to international names and local celebrities. Some recognizable names apart of this collection include: General George Washington, Albert Einstein, and Mrs. Bram Stoker,…
17th Century Contracts: A Glimpse Into Our New Collection
Object FSU_MSS_1948-003_B001_F001 via Florida State University. As a digital library intern for the past two semesters with Special Collections, I have been working on digitizing the 17th-20th Century Correspondence & Documents collection. To celebrate the approach of the end of this project and the midpoint of this semester, I wanted to highlight the first item…
Current Reads: The Trial By Franz Kafka
This post was written by Yenesis Sotomayor, Special Collections & Archives collections management associate. Hello, fellow literary connoisseurs! I am currently engaging in Franz Kafka’s Germanic dystopian The Trial. My experience so far, you may ask, consists of me sinking deeper into my hunchback position and feasting off Kafka’s depressing tale. I adore the bitter…
DPLA’s Black Women’s Suffrage Collection
As we approach Black History Month it is important to highlight the Black women who helped shape American history. The Black Women’s Suffrage Digital Collection is a collaborative project to provide digital access to materials documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights,…
On this day in Claude Pepper History: January 18, 1983
From his early days in the United States Senate, Claude Pepper continually advocated for the expansion of Social Security accommodations for all older Americans. The Claude Pepper Papers trace this advocacy from the Senate, to the U.S. House of Representatives, where in 1983 he was appointed to the National Commission on Social Security Reform. Informally…
On This Day: December 12th, 1765
Among the 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents Collection at FSU’s Special Collections and Archives, there is a letter from Charles Lyttelton dated December 12th, but as the title of the collection would suggest, it was not written in 2022. This 18th century letter was written on December 12, 1765, and discusses newly uncovered tree fossils.…
The Great Immersive Bake Off!
Hello there! My name is Amanda Brito, and I am the Immersive Scholarship graduate assistant in the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship. I am currently a second year MA student in Art History with a concentration in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies. My research focuses on Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean visual culture with…
The Scare of Smallpox Through the Lens of 18th Century Correspondence
Living through life post-2020 pandemic has made us learn a lot of things about preparing for the unknown. But humans aren’t new to the phenomenon of epidemics. While working with the Florida State University’s Special Collections and Archives, I came across a series of letters from the 17th-20th Century Correspondence and Documents collection that mention…
Get Ready to Vote on Election Day!
November 8th is National Election Day! Election Day is the annual day set for general elections, both for federal, state, and local governments. The University has an important resource, FSU Votes , that may come in handy before casting a ballot. There, you can learn more about obtaining a sample ballot, tracking a mail-in ballot, instructions…
Ancient Cuneiform Tablets Spend 100 Years at FSU
The present year of 2022 marks a full century since the acquisition of Special Collections and Archives’ oldest inanimate residents, the cuneiform tablets. Purchased by faculty in 1922, these twenty-five tablets were bought from Edgar J. Banks back when the school was still referred to as the Florida State College for Women. Although they currently…
Tarpon Club at Strozier
Heritage & University Archives has a new exhibit displaying materials from FSU’s Tarpon Club in the Norwood Reading Room at Strozier. This exhibit was put together by Sierria Groom over the summer. Continue reading to learn more about her experience curating this exhibit and to learn where and when you can view it. As an…
National Organization for Women – 56th Anniversary
Today marks the 56th anniversary of the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). In 1966, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Betty Friedan and a group of women organized to found a parallel effort to ensure equal treatment of men and women. What started as a small group of fifteen women, NOW has…
LGBT Oral History Project of North Florida
Oral history is one of the biggest components of understanding the queer experience. Most LGBTQ+ history has been passed down orally, rather than through written material. Oral histories have special characteristics that other resources in our collection don’t have – intimacy. They provide a first-hand view and help us understand a specific moment in time…
Naiad Press and the Oral History of Lesbians in Tallahassee
Did you know that Tallahassee was once home to the largest and oldest lesbian book press in the world? Run by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride, Naiad Press published a wide range of books written by and for lesbians. Authors published through Naiad Press included Patricia Highsmith, Katherine V. Forrest, Ann Bannon, and FSU’s own…
Norman Baker and The Naked Truth
Norman G. Baker assumed many roles during his life – vaudeville performer, mail-order salesman, calliope manufacturer, congressional candidate. However, his greatest notoriety stems from his discredited cancer cure and the media empire that sold it to America.
New to Diginole: Commencement Invitations and Programs
The Spring 2022 semester just came to a close and with it meant a new class of graduating Florida State University students. Here at Special Collections & Archives, we have commencement materials from almost every graduating class in the history of FSU. Our Commencement Program collection contains various materials related to commencement, including programs, announcements,…
Spines of Special Collections
Here in the Special Collections & Archives Division of the Florida State University Libraries, we see a variety of spines on our shelves. Sometimes you get so busy you don’t pay them too much mind. Others catch your eye and bring about curiosity about what may lay inside its bindings. We often have books with…
Parchment & Pajamas: Virtually Visiting Special Collections & Archives
Do you want to see an artists’ book in motion, or an intense zoom on the remains of a wax seal?
Postcards from the Library
This month, Special Collections & Archives teamed up with Student Outreach at Strozier to present Postcards from the Library, highlighting books and objects about travel, home, and identity. Our window display addresses FSU memorabilia and the International Program, general travel containing objects from the collections of our donors, World’s Fair souvenirs, and immigration and identity.…
Digitizing Local History
One of my favorite programs I oversee is our Community Digitization Partnerships. These partnerships allow me to work with local organizations in the North Florida area to bring their materials online via DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository. We often work with non-traditional organizations like schools and churches, bringing collections online that would otherwise be unknown to…
Beautiful Bindings in the Shaw Collection
The John MacKay Shaw Childhood in Poetry Collection is the home of thousands of books which means that it is also the home of thousands of bindings. A lot of the time, the binding of a book is overlooked so, seeing as I have spent the last couple of months studying the books and bindings…
Anna Forbes Liddell: Suffragist, scholar, and Distinguished Professor
Anna Forbes Liddell was one of the first professors to be honored as a Distinguished Professor at FSU. She received the award in 1959, prior to it being named the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Award. Liddell taught at Florida State College for Women, eventually Florida State University, from 1926 until her retirement in 1962.…
Black History Month at Special Collections: Langston Hughes
This February, we are celebrating Black History Month by highlighting some of the Black authors and artists that we feature in our collections. Today I want to acknowledge poet, novelist, and activist, Langston Hughes. Hughes was a prominent figure of the Harlem Renaissance, his work known for capturing snapshots of daily life for Black Americans.…
Reels and Reels of Film: Assessing the AV Holdings in SCA
The following blog post was written by Lukas Foerster, FSU Special Collections & Archives Fall 2021 Intern. As an intern at FSU Libraries Special Collections & Archives department, I took part in a number of preservation and cataloging projects during the fall term, most of them centered around audiovisual material. A wide variety of moving…
New Additions to the Emmett Till Research Guide
o facilitate the Florida State University Libraries and the FSU School of Communication partnership with the West Tallahatchie School District in Tallahatchie County Mississipp
More Than Old Books: Tarot Cards in Special Collections
I’ve been working at SCA since September of 2021 and during my time here I’ve discovered that the archive is so much more than ancient, leather-bound books. So I’ve come to share one of the things I love most about SCA: we have a tarot deck.
Vintage Valentines in the Archives
In celebration of Valentine’s Day we are reposting this entry from 2020. Valentine’s Day gained popularity in the United States with the introduction of mass-produced Valentines cards around the middle of the 19th century. Most of these early cards have long since disappeared, but we are fortunate to have many examples of early 20th century…
A Strange Find at the Claude Pepper Library
One of the strangest items that I’ve ever come across in the archives is not a document or an artifact, but rather something more organic. In the Spring of 2018, the staff at the Claude Pepper Library were in the early stages of reviewing many of the smaller political collections with the end goal of…
Introductions and the Medial S/f
We decided we would tell you a little about ourselves and the work we do in Special Collections and Archives. I am Dianna Bradley and I have been assisting in Special Collections and Archives for a little over 4 years now. I am a cataloger at FSU Libraries and work on managing our records, including…
Women of the Movement: The Press and Emmett Till
On January 6, ABC aired the first two parts of the historical drama Women of the Movement, centered on Mamie Till-Mobley and her devotion to justice for her murdered son Emmett Till. Among other sources, the series draws heavily from Devery Anderson’s 2015 monograph Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the…
Hymn To the… Purple and Gold?
Happy College Colors Day! To celebrate, we wanted to share an interesting bit of our university’s history with you. Though Florida State University is recognized by its garnet and gold school colors, FSU’s predecessor institutions went through several color changes before settling on the iconic combination that we are so familiar with today. The story…
Amazing Grace: Tallahassee’s Countercultural Newspaper
What do you think of when you think of the culture of the late 1960s and 1970s? Hippies? Beatnik literature? Civil Rights? The Beatles? Woodstock? All of those events, movements, people, and art that you might be thinking of belong to a certain period in history: the counterculture movement. Permeating everything from clothing, music, culture,…
The Casual Dirac
The Paul A.M. Dirac Papers are a terrific source of information about the public, scholarly side of Paul Dirac: the lecturer, the genius mathematician, a theorist among theorists. However, in our eagerness to honor someone’s professional achievements, it’s easy to gloss over the rest of their personality, the private figure that coexists with the public…
Money in the French Revolution
I will admit, military history is not an interest or a forte but as we’ve been working on digitizing Journal Militaire for a graduate student at The Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, I have been reviewing the images prior to making them available in the digital library. Journal Militaire was an official French…
Everything but paper: what else does SCA collect?
A lot has been written about our rare books and manuscripts collections on this blog, but did you know SCA also collects all kinds of objects, art, and recording formats? Take a look to learn more about our non-paper collections.
Pocket books: small volumes in the Shaw Collection
Today we are celebrating John MacKay Shaw on the anniversary of his death in 1984. Shaw (1897-1984) was a Scottish-born American businessman and philanthropist who collected works of British and American poetry related to the theme of childhood. When talking about the Shaw collection, we often highlight the 5,000 first and rare editions of major…
State of the FSU Digital Library
Every year, about this time of year, I give an update on all the things that happened with the digital library last year. As you can imagine, the FSU Digital Library in DigiNole: FSU’s Digital Repository experienced some changes in how we do business last year. There were stretches of time where we weren’t adding…
Recycling and Reuse in Medieval Manuscripts
When you think of the Middle Ages, do you think of recycling? While the concept may seem foreign to us now, medieval people regularly reused and recycled all kinds of objects. Obviously, medieval recycling wasn’t concerned with the idea of reducing single-use plastic or trying to decrease contributions to landfills. Instead, recycling was simply a…
Sun City
Recently, we digitized the Sun City Development and Motion Picture Studio Plat Map Sheets for use in a class which led me to look into…what are these exactly? I uncovered a fascinating story of the brother of Cleveland railroad barons and a Georgia inventor who, a decade apart, tried to bring Hollywood to Florida. During…
Maggie Kuhn, Claude Pepper and the Repeal of Mandatory Retirement
“Some persons dodder at 30, others at 80, and some pass through life without “doddering” at all. Our concern should be with competency, not age, race, sex or religion” – Representative Claude Pepper, 1986 There was a time for many professions in the United States when a person’s 65th birthday signaled the end of their…
Found in the Archives: The Capitol March for the Equal Rights Amendment in Tallahassee
October is American Archives Month! As an institution that works alongside and documents the local community, I wanted to highlight two collections housed in the Claude Pepper Library that illustrate local political action in our historic capitol: The National Organization of Women, Tallahassee Chapter Records and the League of Women Voters, Tallahassee Chapter Records. The…
Capturing Virtual FSU
When the world of FSU changed in March 2020, the website for FSU was used as one of the primary communication tools to let students, faculty, and staff know what was going on. New webpages created specifically to share information and news popped up all over fsu.edu and we had no idea how long those…
Contribute to the FSU Community COVID 19 Project
Students, faculty, and alumni! Heritage & University Archives is collecting stories and experiences from the FSU community during COVID-19. University life during a pandemic will be studied by future scholars. During this pandemic, we have received requests surrounding the 1918 Flu Pandemic. Unfortunately, not many documents describing these experiences survive in the archive. To create…
Solar Energy: A Brief Look Back
In the early 1970’s the United States was in the midst of an energy crisis. Massive oil shortages and high prices made it clear that alternative ideas for energy production were needed and solar power was a clear front runner. The origins of the solar cell in the United States date back to inventor Charles…
Catastrophic Health Care: A Goal Not Met
In the Summer of 1987, Representative Claude Pepper introduced House Resolution 2654. In it a request was made to establish a 12-member committee charged with providing recommendations to Congress for a comprehensive health care program for all Americans. In October of 1988, Pepper was appointed as the chairperson of the United States Bipartisan Commission on…
Updated SCA Page in Florida History Research Guide
This post was co-authored by Jennifer Fain. Special Collections & Archives is pleased to announce our new and improved page on the Florida History research guide. One of our major projects this summer in light of Covid-19 and the need for expanded online services has been to update our presence on FSU Library research guides…
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